Abstract

Since the Nineties architectural thought employs the new language of software to describe, design, predict, simulate and evaluate form. Lately, digital technology has been enhancing new productive equipment: the virtually designed forms become prototypes and physical models. Computational design bequeaths a post-digital need for material and for fabrication: it’s the File-to-Factory age. Digital fabrication technologies actually have a deep impact on the fulfilment of architecture and on its design methods, above all. These facilities increase the level of control that architects have over the designed and consequently materialized architectural form. “Digital materiality” (Digital materiality in architecture, Zürich: Lars Müller
Publishing, 2008) turns the digital into physical. This story telling uses some explanatory design experiences relating to the challenge of the traditional thinking of design. It explores the real changes in the way architects design and build the physical environment and foresee how to bring them into the real architectural practice.